1968

A few years ago an investment index called the VIX was created.  The Volatility Index is a measure of how volatile the stock market is at the moment.  The VIX doesn't measure whether the market is going up or down.  It measures how much it is bouncing around without moving in any one direction.  If their was a VIX that measured how volatile society is at a point in time and if we studied the Social VIX for the twentieth century, 1968 would win hands down.  A hell of a lot happened that year.

I was in college in 1968 and a lot was happening on campus.  But it wasn't just the campus of the school I was attending.  It was true of campuses across the U.S.  It was also true of campuses in many other parts of the world, something I was not really aware of at the time.  And it wasn't just campus volatility, volatility was everywhere.

But that was a long time ago and I had pretty much forgotten about it.  Then I was at a social event and somebody said "boy, there's a lot of stuff going on now".  A friend of mine said "this is nothing compared to 1968".  So that's once.  Then my brother sent me a book called "Postwar" by Tony Judt.  It is a history of Europe after the end of World War II.  It was my first introduction to the student unrest on campuses across Europe, a lot of it in 1968.  That's twice.  And then CNN started running an excellent series called "The '60s", that was produced by Tom Hanks, among others.  One episode was simply and appropriately titled "1968".  That's three times.  I can take a hint.  It's time for a blog post.

Now the approach of the Hanks series was thematic ("The Space Race", "Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'n Roll", etc.) rather than a strict chronology.  But 1968 was justifiably singled out.  And in the "1968" episode one of the talking heads was Mark Kurlansky, author of a book simply called "1968".  At that point I just had to get the book and read it.  I am glad I did.  For those who were not around then, or for those who have forgotten, let me review some of the major events of 1968.

1968 came toward the middle of the Vietnam war.  It turns out that U.S. casualties peaked in 1968 at 14,589 U.S. servicemen killed.  The total U.S. deaths for the entire war was just under 60,000 so about 25% of them happened in 1968.  And, to provide even more context, this number is higher than all the 9/11 deaths plus all the U.S. deaths in Iraq plus all the U.S. deaths in Afghanistan added together.  But 1968 marked a turning point in Vietnam for other reasons.  The My Lie massacre happened in 1968.  U.S. soldiers wiped out a Vietnamese village killing over 300 civilians, many of them women and children. But details didn't become broadly known until 1969.  In the mean time something even more important happened.

At the end of January the North Vietnamese launched what was later referred to as the Tet Offensive.  They launched simultaneous attacks across pretty much all of South Vietnam.  One of the most well known attacks (it happened close to a large media presence) was the attack on the U.S. Embassy in what was then called Saigon.  The attack was a failure for the North from a military perspective but it ultimately turned out to be a giant political success.  Up to this point the U.S. approach was "kill bad guys".  The theory was eventually enough of the bad guys would be dead and victory would be ours.  With this in mind, the official line was "we are killing a lot of bad guys so we will achieve victory soon".  But Tet resulted in a large shift in the number of people who believed the official line.  Walter Cronkite, then the most respected name in journalism, went to Vietnam.  Cronkite came back and characterized the situation as "mired in a stalemate".  It took some time but the U.S. strategy shifted from aggressive U.S. military led action to "Vietnam-ization", essentially declaring victory and leaving after turning the war over to the South Vietnamese.  The U.S. military got out, although the CIA stayed.  And, in 1975 the North won.  So, for a number of reasons 1968 was the turning point in terms of the U.S. and the war in Vietnam.

1968 was notable for one particular civil rights event.  Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated.  By 1968 the civil rights movement had peaked to some extent.  The movement was very effective in the '50s and early '60s.  The Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964.  But with the passing of the act the focus moved from the South to the North.  The movement was broadly popular when what we were seeing was vicious white people in authority beating up clean cut black people in the South.  But when the focus moved to blacks getting blue collar jobs historically held by whites and blacks trying to move into traditionally white neighborhoods, as it did when the focus moved from Selma Alabama to Chicago Illinois, then the movement became much less popular.

And the civil rights movement had been successful by employing nonviolent means.  But a new generation of leaders came to the fore who were much more comfortable employing violent means.  So Dr. King was being overshadowed by others like the Black Panthers.  King felt this deeply in the weeks before his death.  An attempted demonstration organized by King to support Memphis garbage workers just before he was killed ended up turning violent.  And, of course, his assassination was a quintessentially violent act.  And the riots that followed the news of his assassination were marked by violence.  So 1968 was important to civil rights but in an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary sense.

Kurlansky dates the feminist movement to 1968.  A number of women held a demonstration at the Miss America pageant that got a lot of coverage.  The feminist movement, like many others is often more accurately characterized as a evolution rather than an revolution.  "Sex and the Single Girl" had been published in 1962.  "The Feminine Mystique" had been published in 1963.  The National Organization for Women had been founded in 1966. But none of these events had broken out into the broader public context.  The Miss America demonstration was widely covered in the media and got people talking.  People started talking about bra burning and equal pay.  "What is the proper place for women in society" became a legitimate subject for discussion.  And in 1968 the first woman was allowed to purchase a seat on the New York Stock Exchange.  And the first union to represent then Stewardesses now Flight Attendants won major concessions from airlines in 1968.

So in the U.S. you had civil rights, the Vietnam War and Women's rights on the agenda and stirring things up.  (I'm skipping over the Assassination of Bobby Kennedy while he was running for president and lots of other things in the interests of brevity.)  This led to a lot of student unrest on college campuses across the country.  Even if you think the students were crazy it makes some kind of sense that there was a lot of student unrest in the U.S.  But Judt spends a lot of time documenting similar student unrest broadly across Europe.  And Kurlansky talks about student unrest in Mexico, Italy, France, and Germany.  What's going on?

The civil rights movement and the Vietnam War were specific to the U.S.  And Kurlansky does a good job of documenting the roots of the women's movement in the civil rights movement.  Women's rights are civil rights and a lot of the early leaders of the women's movement got their early training in the civil rights movement.  So they knew what to do and how to do it because of earlier civil rights experience.  But none of this was true of these other parts of the world.  So what was up with all that?  That's a question I will get back to later.  But for the moment I want to talk about Czechoslovakia.

Another major event in 1968 was the "Prague Spring", named after the capital of Czechoslovakia.  (Czechoslovakia has since been peacefully split into the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic.)  For unique and peculiar reasons an experiment was tried out in Prague in the spring of 1968. Communism is the name of a philosophy developed by Marx and Engels in France in the 1800s.  The first country that was ostensibly governed according to communist principles was the USSR (now Russia) starting in about 1920.  As the father figure of communism, the story goes, the USSR is "first among equals".  But is that really true?  In Prague they ran the experiment.  They did not try to move away from Communism.  They did not try to move away from a close relationship with the USSR.  What they did try was to move toward democracy and a free press.  Now on paper communist countries had always been democratic.  They held elections regularly and had extremely high voter participation.  It just so happened that the communist guy always won.

A long time communist with close ties to the USSR named Dubcek rose to the top spot in Czechoslovakia.  He was a true believer in communism so he didn't want to change that.  He wanted to keep the communist party in charge and use communist principles to guide policy.  But he did not see this as incompatible with a free press and a general relaxation in what was permitted behavior.  But it turned out to be too much for the leaders in the USSR (Brezhnev and Kosygin).  They organized a military invasion from neighboring "east block" countries.  Dubcek lasted the year out but just barely.

This event had lasting consequences.  It exposed the leadership in the USSR as not so much communists as your run of the mill autocratic dictators.  In a clash between maintaining power and communist ideology the call would always be made in favor of power.  This completely destroyed the intellectual underpinning of the communist movement.  It took another 20 years to sweep communism away as a governing philosophy.  But the invasion of Czechoslovakia completely delegitimized communism as a philosophy.  After the invasion any action associated with a "communist" country could only be analyzed in a pure power politics framework.  This is a weakness.  It may not seem to be that big of a weakness.  But countries depend on being seen as acting out of a sense of good will and moral rightness at least some of the time. It was no longer possible to see actions of communist countries in this light and the seemingly small hurts accumulated as a result eventually built up to the point where they became fatal.  Now let me return to the broader picture.

Kurlansky spends considerable effort trying to figure out why "1968" happened in 1968.  He points out the critical role played by the media.  If an event wasn't covered in the media it effectively didn't happen.  The media has a lot of flexibility when it comes to "editorial judgment", deciding what to cover and how much to cover it.  But there is one thing the media can't resist.  In the context of foreign conflicts it goes by the alliterative name of "bang bang" footage.  Footage of people getting beat up, shot, or blown up almost always makes it on the air.  Another way to put it is a phrase often associated with local news coverage:  "if it bleeds, it leads".

Kurlansky describes a telling incident involving a sheriff named Pritchett who presided over a place called Albany, Georgia.  Early in his career King ran an extensive civil rights campaign in the area.  It was a total bust.  It wasn't that bad things weren't happening.  They were.  And it wasn't that King was unable to pull off mass demonstrations resulting an large numbers of arrests.  He was.  But sheriff Pritchett was unfailingly polite and scrupulously avoided violence.  So there was no "bang bang" footage.  There were no pictures of bleeding bodies because no shots were fired and nobody was beat up.  As a result the media stayed away in droves and no one has heard of the Albany Georgia civil rights campaign.

King and other civil rights leaders learned from this experience.  In the future they sought out people like sheriff "Bull" Connor and various other representatives of entrenched power who could be reliably counted on to provide lots of bad behavior for the TV people to put on the nightly news.  In the absence of actual blood and gore it was occasionally acceptable to substitute behavior like that of Governor Wallace when he blocked doorways and proposed "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever" as the cameras rolled.  But in terms of explaining why "1968" happened in 1968 this attribute of how news decisions are made actually predated 1968 by quite a bit.  So we must look elsewhere.

Kurlansky attributes it to changes in the technology of how news gets from the scene to the TV screen.  I think he is right in his general thesis but that his details are wrong.  The first thing to note is the intrusion of "TV screen" in the above sentence.  TV news was a very primitive business in the '50s generally resembling those old timey newsreels that used to be shown in movie theaters in the '30s and '40s.  But things improved quickly and by 1968 most people were getting the bulk of their news from TV.  And moving pictures are much more compelling than text or even still pictures.  "bang bang" footage is wonderful at attracting eyeballs, even on a black and white TV.  A TV news broadcast that could routinely show "bang bang" was definitely going to take up most of the "news oxygen" in the room.

Kurlansky talks about two innovations.  One is video tape and the other is satellite transmission.  Let me take each in turn.

The importance of satellite transmission was that it made it possible to move pictures great distances (i.e. from Saigon to New York) quickly.  And by 1968 we were getting a lot of pictures from Vietnam.  But satellite transmission at that time was too primitive to be reliable.  It was only suitable for the odd stunt in the '60s.  Instead I think the actual key innovation for international stories like Vietnam was the jet airplane.  Jet planes are faster, more comfortable, more reliable, and cheaper than propeller planes.  So by 1968 air travel had expanded massively.  With jets you could throw some film or video on a plane and move it great distances quickly.  This made it possible to get moving pictures from Vietnam to New York, the center of the U.S. news universe in 1968, in less than 24 hours.

Another technological innovation, one that was very helpful in covering domestic stories, was "cable".  These were high tech wires that permitted TV signals to be transmitted long distances.  At this time they were far too expensive and persnickety to be used as part of a "cable TV" system, the way we now think of "cable".  But starting in 1956 NBC was technologically able to have its flagship news broadcast feature two anchors, one in New York and the other in Washington DC.  The show switched between anchors as it moved from story to story.  This was just barely possible in 1956.  By 1968 it was possible to use intercity cables to instantaneously ship video to New York from many medium and large cities scattered around the country.  So if a riot happened pretty much anywhere in the country during the day, video from the riot could air on the news on the same day.

Kurlansky's point on video also has to do with increasing flexibility and speeding things up.  Before video news footage was shot on 16 mm black and white film.  The film then had to be developed, printed, and edited.  Both the film stock and the processing were expensive and time consuming.  This caused camera men to be very careful what they shot.  Shooting 15 minutes to get 1 minute of useful film was ok.  Shooting three hours was not.  But video tape was reusable.  If you shot 3 hours and only used a minute you just recycled the rest.  And video was quicker and easier to edit.  So it became possible to shoot a lot more.  This in turn, made it more likely you got the "money" shot.  The thinking changed from "be careful" to "shoot everything".  The problem with this is that video based news cameras did not really become practical until Sony introduced the Betamax in 1975.  But by 1968 studio video equipment was available at TV stations around the country.  Film (now often color film) could be shot, rushed to a nearby TV station, transferred to video, edited, and cabled to New York in hours not days.  The switch to end to end video was not realized until the late '70s but the general speedup of the hybrid system was making an impact by 1968.

Another thing that is well documented in Kurlansky's book is that various groups were learning from each other.  A technique would be pioneered in the civil rights movement.  It would then move to the anti-war movement.  And it would eventually be used by the feminist movement.  In the same way that by the '60s rock 'n roll artists were intimately aware what other musicians were doing, the various protest movements were very aware of what other protest movements were doing.

And there was a cultural thing going on that can be summarized by the phrase "question authority".  I was personally aware of this at the time.  If we look at what this country says it stands for, things like the "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" (Declaration of Independence), "secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and out Posterity" (preamble to the U.S. Constitution) , and "all men are created equal" (Declaration of Independence) and then we look at what this country actually does there is often a contradiction.  Segregation and unequal treatment of black people is not consistent with "all men are created equal".  A literal reading of the words is consistent with a "separate but equal" approach to women.  But cultures evolve.  And it is reasonable to evolve "all men are created equal" to "all men and women are created equal".  So our professed beliefs are incompatible with an unequal treatment of women.

The Vietnam war is a more complicated situation.  The Constitution specifically states that Congress, not the President, is the only body that can "declare war".  The work around for this is the Gulf of Tonkin resolution.  Congress passed it.  The executive took it as sufficient authority to prosecute the war.  Legalistic arguments can be made on both sides but that is not the principal bone of contention. At its deepest foundation the basic argument was not the fact of the war but how it was prosecuted.  The U.S. had a much larger industrial base.  It had a much larger population.  It had much better technology.  But we lost anyhow.

Imagine we had gone into Vietnam and won.  Imagine further that the whole thing had taken six months, only cost a billion dollars, and only have cost a few dozen U.S. lives.  Under those circumstances people would have decided it was not worth arguing over.  But none of those "imagine"s were true.  So people carefully examined why we got involved in the first place and found the whole process wanting.  And hanging over it all was the fact that our government did not play straight with us.  If you want more on the subject then check out my "Vietnam" blog post at http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2014/04/vietnam-lessons-learned.html.  But all this called into question the basic "we're the good guys" assumption we have about ourselves.  We meddled in the affairs of a foreign country.  We spent a lot of money.  We got a lot of people killed.  And specifically at My Lie (and probably at a bunch of other times and places) we killed a bunch of women and children.  We lost.  None of that is consistent with the behavior of good guys.

More generally the first couple of decades after World War II were good times.  The economy was growing.  Life was getting better for everyone.  It was getting better faster for some but it seemed to be getting at least a little better for everyone.  And we were feeling pretty good about ourselves.  We had just won the war.  We were having the "baby boom" and as a result investing a lot of money in education.  And we were teaching ourselves about "American" values.  And then there was the cold war.  The commies were the bad guys.  How do we know?  'Cause we do good stuff and they do bad stuff.  And, since it looked like the cold war would be a long and difficult struggle, all this good stuff/bad stuff was taught in our schools.

We were the "all men are created equal" people.  Of course, the commies said they were too but they were lying.  And one way you could tell they were lying is because they built the Iron Curtain and put down uprisings (Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, others) and suppressed free speech.  We, on the other hand, had the two longest open borders in the world (U.S. - Canada and U.S. - Mexico).  We stand for freedom and, if you stand for freedom, you don't need no stinking fences.  (I will pass up the opportunity to discuss the current "build the dang fence" on the U.S. - Mexico border debate here.)  That's what we were taught in school.  And, by the way the communist economic model sucks.  The democratic (never call it "capitalist") economic model is much better.  Just look at all the cars and refrigerators and such.  (In 1959 Richard Nixon, then vice president, literally had a debate on economic systems with Nikita Khrushchev, then "Chairman" of the USSR, at an exhibit in Moscow that featured, among other things, kitchen appliances).

The apparent contradiction between words and actions was very troubling.  But maybe there was a good explanation.  What's the harm in asking?  After all, our core values included free speech and representative government.  And it's a given that we are not oppressed like those people who live under the control of those bad old communists.  So people asked.  And the response in way too many cases was "shut up and sit down, you're bothering me".  Now it might be that it was not the right time or not the right place.  But there was also no good response to "what is the right time?" or "what is the right place?" either.  Certainly some people were willing to discuss these matters.  But for the most part they were the pro-civil rights, anti-war, and pro-women's rights people.  And they were not the people who held the reigns of power.

So, if the good guys were trying to change the system in good ways, how did it all go wrong?  Kurlansky brings a lot to the discussion on this subject.  His basic conclusion is that there was a lot of confusion, incoherence, and a disdain for anything practical.  This was something I did not take much notice of at the time.

As but one of many examples, he talks about the poet Allen Ginsberg.  The 1968 Democratic convention was held in Chicago.  What was later described as a "police riot" broke out and was captured on TV.  Hundreds were beaten or arrested.  Ginsberg was a peaceful soul.  His solution to all the chaos:  have everyone chant "Om".  Needless to say his "solution" was completely ineffective and sounded idiotic to normal people.  And there were innumerable interminable debates, hundreds of marches, hundreds of sit ins.  But in a lot of cases it was hard to figure out exactly what would fix the problem that the debate, march, or sit in was about.  Kurlansky quotes numerous key players as saying "we were making it up as we went along" and "we never did end up deciding what we wanted".  During this period there was a very popular newspaper comic strip called "Li'l Abner".  It was drawn by Al Capp.  Capp coined the acronym SWINE - Students Wildly Indignant about Nearly Everything.  Capp was good at getting at deep truths in what was ostensibly a light hearted comic strip.

So there was a core of goodness and truth involved in the chaos that characterized 1968.  But there was a whole lot of anarchy, irresponsible behavior, and general chaos involved too.  The intensity of it all put a lot of people off.  A lot of people were asking very loudly for a lot of change.  Many people felt simply overwhelmed.  And then there were the people of good will who asked the agents of change "what do you want?"  Too often they got "Om" level impracticality: "all you need is love".  What were these people to conclude except that "the demonstrators have no clue".  For good reasons and bad this generated a backlash and delegitimized liberals.  Nixon ran on a "law and order" platform in 1968 and won.  He then cracked down on anyone he didn't like, dragged the Vietnam War out until 1975, and delivered underwhelming economic results.  He was, however, successfully able to derail the women's movement and put civil rights on the back burner.  He was eventually impeached for Watergate.

The country reacted by then electing the liberal Democrat Jimmy Carter.  But his presidency is generally rated a failure (bad economy, embarrassment in Iran).  Carter was followed after one term by Reagan.  Nixon was more of an opportunist than a doctrinaire conservative.  But Regan was conservative to his bones.  Liberalism has yet to recover from the excesses of the '60s.  But the rate of change has accelerated.  We now get a new iPhone a year.  Gay rights has gone from a "third rail" issue (don't touch it - you'll get electrocuted) to a good "vote getter" issue that politicians are happy to embrace.  Both the first iPhone and the old view of gay rights are only a decade old.  The ability for individuals to access the Internet is now about 2 decades old.  I have an old school car that you start by turning the key in the ignition, just the way you did in 1968 (and before).  Many new cars sense the presence of your key while it is in your pocket.  You literally push a button and go.

What has changed is people's ability to cope with a rapid rate of change.  We now have a lot of experience with everything around us changing all the time.  And it's not just new things like iPhones.  It's old things like cars.  It's gotten so that we now take as a given that news about an event taking place ten thousand miles away is available within seconds on our mobile phone. In 1968 the ability to talk to a friend who lived in another state without having to involve an operator was relatively new.  And the ability to directly connect to a phone located on another continent was only to be found in science fiction movies.  In fact, a movie that was released in 1968, "2001, a Space Odyssey", contained a scene involving what was then called a Picture Phone.  Today we know it as Skype.  And today a Skype call to someone in another country or a "long distance" call to a good chunk of the world does not cost extra.  In 1968 a "long distance" call was quite expensive, running perhaps a dollar a minute or more.

So would people be as put out by the doings of 1968 now?  I think they would.  What we have become used to is technological change.  We take it as a given that bigger, better, faster, gadgets are just around the corner.  And sure, the first time you sit down in a "push button" car, as I did about a year ago, it's disconcerting.  But it takes only a few minutes to learn enough to figure out how to operate it well enough to get where you want to go.  But the changes that gave people the most trouble in 1968 were social changes.  And, although society's opinion of gay rights, a social change if there ever was one, has "come a long way, baby" for most people, there are a lot of people who are extremely put out and want to go back to "the good old days".  And we are still battling over civil rights and women's rights.  And to this day there is a large group of people who are just as strongly of the opinion that "the old ways are the best ways" on both of these subjects now as they ever were.

There aren't as many active agents of chaos as there were in 1968 and that's a good thing.  But I think we have also gotten better at fooling ourselves.  We now are much better at keeping our darker impulses hidden.  And that actually makes those darker impulses harder to deal with.  Rednecks setting police dogs on well behaved black people is pretty out in the open. It's a bad thing and it's pretty obvious it's a bad thing.  Less obvious methods of discrimination can be just as effective in the long run as the more obvious methods of yesteryear.  But they are much harder to deal with because there is no "bang bang" video to shock everybody into action with.